Part 10

Yes, it was safe in Florrie’s competent hands, dear little room. In her heart of hearts, though she had no faintest flicker of criticism or comparison except for that one strangely painful memory of the rush of pinkness,--Miss Glover very much preferred her own room, shabby and simple as it was, to Florrie’s; just as, though so well aware of the relative insignificance of her garden, she knew that she would prefer it to the Isaacsons', with its arches of roses and its geraniums in white stone vases. She liked quiet, soft, gentle things; the ever-so-faded ancient chintzes on her aunt’s chairs and sofa, showing here and there a ghostly bird of paradise or a knot of nearly obliterated flowers, her aunt’s absurd, faded, old-fashioned carpet,--fortunately faded!--and her grandmother’s Lowestoft cups ranged above the mantelpiece. Everything was in its place; her knitting-basket between her chair and the fireplace; her beaded footstool before the best armchair, where Florrie sat; the little table, with a bowl of white and purple pansies on it, where lay the daily paper and the two books from the circulating library. All were dear to her; all spoke of continuity with the past, of long association, of quiet, small, peaceful activities; and as she looked about she knew that her heart would have sunk a little at the thought of leaving them, had it not been for Florrie’s sustaining presence.

Florrie, while her second cup of tea was being made, drew forth and laid beside the tea-tray, with an air of infinite sagacity, the coupons for the reserved seats in the first-class carriage. “_I’ll_ keep my eyes on those,” said Florrie. It was almost as if they had been tickets for some brilliant entertainment--as if, Miss Glover felt, she and Jane were going to be taken to the opera rather than to Switzerland. It was owing to Florrie that she had almost come to feel that Switzerland _was_ the opera.

But that night, when they had gone upstairs and the house was still, the sense of adventure deserted her. Sitting in her dressing-gown before her mirror while, with hands that tired so easily, she brushed and braided her hair, she felt, suddenly, very middle-aged, very lonely, ill, and almost frightened. The look of her gaping dressing-case, as she glanced round at it, was frightening, as was the emptiness of the mantelpiece, from which the family photographs had all been taken to be packed, together with the Bible and prayer-book from the table near her bed. It was a room already deserted. It looked as it might look if she had died. What, indeed, in spite of Florrie’s good cheer, if she were to die out there, alone, away from everything and every one she knew? And, with a curious impulse, rising to go and close the gaping dressing-case, she realized that she had not said good-bye to anything. The morning had all been spent in packing--in that and in preparations for Florrie’s arrival; and all the afternoon Florrie had been with her, and she was to be with her till her departure to-morrow. She would not again be alone in her little house; she would not again be alone in her garden. The thought of her pansies came with a pang of reproach; it was as if she had forgotten them, like children sent to bed without a good-night kiss.

She drew her curtain and looked out. Yes; there they were. The moon was shining brightly and the white pansies lay below like pools of milk upon the ground. She looked at them for some moments, while the soft fragrance of the night mounted to her and seemed with gently supplicating hands to draw her forth; and then, cautiously--for Florrie slept across the way--but with decision, she put on her heavy cloak over her dressing-gown, wrapped a shawl about her head and shoulders, and stole downstairs.

The drawing-room was very dark; she felt her way swiftly through it past the familiar objects, and the conservatory door opened on a flood of silvery light. She saw the high, shining disk of the moon, and the great black poplar tree that grew in the neighbouring garden seemed vast against the sky. As she stepped out, she made herself think of Diamond in “At the Back of the North Wind.” It was like stepping into a fairy-tale; only something more sweet and solemn than a fairy-tale, as that book was; something, for all its beauty, a little awful. But when she looked down from the moon, the sky, the poplar, there was only sweetness. The fragrance that had solicited her seemed now to welcome her, to clasp and caress her. The pansies were all looking up at her. On the wall Madame Alfred Carrière was more beautiful than she had ever before seen her, her pale flowers and buds making a constellation against the darkness.

She walked round the path, looking at it all, so glad that she had come, smiling--a child in fairyland, or a spirit arrived in Paradise and finding it strange yet familiar--as Paradise should be. Perhaps, she thought, dying would be like that: a stepping out from the darkness into something vast and solemn that would slowly gather about one into well-known and transfigured shapes, into white pansies growing thickly at one’s feet. She stooped in the moonlight and passed her hands over their upturned faces. They were flowers entranced, neither sleeping nor awake; and she felt, as her fingers touched their soft, dewy petals, as if their dreams with their whiteness flowed into her. To leave them was like leaving her very self, yet the parting now was all peace and innocent acquiescence, like them, and she was still smiling as she whispered to them, “Good-bye, darlings.”

III

SWITZERLAND was like the opera, and for her first months there Miss Glover felt as if she watched it from a box--very much at the back and looking past many heads at the vast display. Everything that Florrie had said was true: the scenery was more magnificent than she could have imagined, oppressively more, and the people, again oppressively, more interesting. They were, these people, engaged all of them in trying to keep alive, and, when they failed in that, in dying, dying under one’s eyes from day to day; and in the publicity of such occupations there was something as abnormal as was the size of the mountains. Some of these people she came to know a little--those, usually, who had given up: the dear little Russian girl who, alas, died in December; the sulky, affectionate French boy; and the large yet wasted German singer who made Miss Glover think of a splendid fruit keeping still its shell of form and colour while eaten away inside by wasps. Fraülein Schmidt liked to have her play Schubert and Schumann songs to her, and still tried to sing attainable passages here and there in a queer, booming, hollow voice that made Miss Glover, again, think of the wasps imprisoned and buzzing. But most of the people remained parts of the spectacle to her. They engaged, when they were well enough, in winter sports; they talked together of books she had never heard of, and of things she had never thought of; and often, moreover, she could not understand what they said, as her languages did not extend beyond rather simple French and German, and Dante with a dictionary.

The only other English person there was a young man who made her think of the Prince Charlie roses; he was sombre and delicate and beautiful and did not talk to anybody, sitting apart and reading all day long. Miss Glover wondered a good deal about him, and watched him sometimes from her place on the snow-sifted balcony when they lay there encased in fur bags and buttressed with hot-water bottles. His name was Lord Ninian Carstairs; and that was like the roses, too.

Once, when they were alone on the balcony, their recumbent chairs near one another, he lifted his eyes suddenly and found hers fixed upon him, and perhaps their wistful and ingenuous absorption touched him, for, flushing faintly,--he was a shy young man,--he asked if she were feeling better.

She said she couldn’t quite tell. It was difficult to tell what one felt, didn’t he find? Everything was so different; so exciting in a way; and when one was excited one felt, perhaps, better than one was.

Lord Ninian laughed shortly at that, and said that he didn’t feel excited; he wished he could.

“I’m depressed, too, sometimes,” said Miss Glover; and then he sighed.

“One gets so abominably homesick in this hole,” he said.

She had never thought of such splendour as being, possibly, to anybody, a hole; but she knew what it was to feel homesick. They smiled at each other when they met after that, she and Lord Ninian, and he lent her magazines and books. When she heard that he had died,--she had not seen him for a week and had feared for him,--she felt very, very sad and her thoughts turned in great longing to Acacia Road and to her garden.

She wanted very much to live to see her garden again; but she could not help being frightened lest she should not; for, as the winter wore on, it became evident to her, and all the more because every one else was so carefully unaware of it, that one of the things that Florrie had predicted was not to come true. She was not to return cured. She was not going to get better. At first the slow burning of fever had seemed only part of the excitement, but she could not go on thinking it that when it began to leave her breathless, trembling, faint. By the time that the miracle of the Alpine flower-meadows was revealed to her and she had watched the snow recede and the jonquils and anemones advance, she knew that if she wished to die at home she must soon go. They would not consent to that at once. They said that the spring months were full of magic, and she was persuaded to stay on. They were magically beautiful and she was glad to see them, but she longed more and more to see her little garden. She dreamed sometimes of her pansies at night, and it seemed to her once that as she stooped in the moonlight and touched them she was cured; the fever fell from her; a cool white peace flowed into her veins; and when she looked up from them, the night was gone and the sun was rising over her Surrey hills.

At the beginning of June they consented that she should go. They did not tell her the truth, of course. They said that she might pass the summer in England, since she wished so much to return there, and that she must come back for next winter; but she knew that if her state had not been recognized as hopeless they would not have let her go. It was hopeless, and she summoned all her strength and resolution, that she might live until she reached Acacia Road.

IV

FLORRIE met her at Victoria. Florrie did not know that it was hopeless, though she knew that it was not as yet, a cure; but from the way that she controlled her features to a determined joviality Miss Glover could infer her shock, her grief, her consternation. The glance, too, that Jane and Florrie exchanged was revealing, had she been in need of revelations.

After a night in Florrie’s flat, however, she knew that she looked so much better that poor Florrie, when she came to see her in the morning, was quite erroneously cheered. “_You’re_ all right,” Florrie declared. “The journey’s knocked you about a bit; but once we get you down to Surrey, Jane and I, you’ll pick up in no time. After all, there’s no place like home, is there?”

Miss Glover, from her pillows, smiled. She felt very fond of kind Florrie and sorry for her that she must, so soon, suffer sadness on her account.

It was difficult, in the train, to listen to Florrie’s talk. After her fright of the day before, Florrie had cheered up so tremendously that she talked even more than usual, of her friends, her enterprises, of how she was going yachting that autumn with the Forestalls, and of how Di Haymouth had just had a baby.

“A splendid boy, and Mr. and Mrs. Isaacson are fairly off their heads with pride and pleasure. Such a layette, my dear, you never saw! Real lace through and through--and the cradle of a regular little prince! I gave him a silver porringer for his christening; a lovely thing, all heavy _repoussé_ work with his initials on a shield at one side. Di say it’s the prettiest porringer she ever saw.”

It was difficult to listen to Florrie and to nod and smile at the right moment when she was thinking of her garden and wondering if Florrie had really remembered to sow the sweet peas and mignonette. Even if she hadn’t, the Madame Alfred Carrière and the Prince Charlie roses would be out, and the last tulips, and the pansies, of course. And it was such a beautiful day, just such a day as that she had risen to look at when, in her dream, the pansies had cured her.

The drive from the station up to Acacia Road was a short one. The dear, foolish little porch was there, the bow-window, the laurel-bushes. Her own home. As she saw it she felt such a lift of the heart that it seemed to her, too, that she might be going to get better after all. Florrie and Jane helped her out and she and Florrie went into the sitting-room. She looked round it, smiling, while she felt her happy, fluttering breaths like those of some wandering bird put back into its own dear cage again, safe, secure, bewildered a little in its contentment. She was like such a trivial little cage-bird; she was meant for Acacia Road, and not for Swiss mountains.

Everything was the same: even her knitting-basket stood waiting for her, and all that caught her eye with their unfamiliarity were the flowers, the profusion of flowers, standing in bowls and vases everywhere; perhaps almost too many flowers,--that was like dear, exuberant Florrie,--and all pink.

“Oh--how lovely they are!” she said, finding the fluttering breath fail her a little. “How dear of you, Florrie, to have it all arranged like this!”

“They look welcoming, don’t they?” said Florrie, who laughed with some excitement. “Will you rest, dear, or come into the garden?”

“Oh, the garden, please. I’m not at all tired. I can rest later.”

Florrie still led her by the arm. They went into the conservatory and there came to her then the strangest, dizziest sense of pink--everywhere pink!--shining in at her through the sea-green glass, bursting in at her through the open door.

For a moment she thought that her mind was disordered, and looked up with large, startled eyes at Florrie; but, beaming as she had never yet seen her beam, all complacency and triumphant benevolence, Florrie nodded, saying, “Now for your surprise, my dear. Now for your garden. Just see what I’ve made of it to welcome you!”

They stepped out. Pink. Pink everywhere, above, below, around one. The paths were arched with swinging iron chains on which, already, the long festoons advanced. The border, heaping itself up splendidly against the wall, was splashed with white, yellow, blue and purple, a blaze of colour indeed, but pink dominated, like the sound of trumpets in an orchestra. It also made Miss Glover think, strangely, sickly, of the sound of a gramophone. There was no lawn. The centre of the garden was flagged, with a highly ornamental sun-dial in the middle and a white garden seat and a wonderful white stone basin for the birds. There were no Prince Charlie roses, no mignonette and sweet peas, there were no pansies. Her garden had disappeared.

“There!” said Florrie.

She led her to the garden seat. From here Miss Glover, as she sank down upon it, could see that the back of the house was also dappled with the incessant colour.

“Isn’t it a marvel!” said Florrie. “I hardly dared hope they’d grow as they have, but Dorothy Perkins is a winner, and these latest climbers run her close. I spared nothing, my dear, nothing--manure, bone-meal, labour. The men were working here for a week last autumn. All the old soil was carted away and a rich loam put in three feet deep. I put them in big. I knew I could get them to take if I took enough pains over it. Those chains will be covered in another month. I knew it would do you more good than any open-air cure to find such a garden waiting for you. I’d defy anybody to have the blues in this garden! In its little way it’s just an epitome of joy, isn’t it? It’s done _me_ good, to begin with! I’ve been having tea out here every day in my week-ends and every one who’s seen it and heard about my plan says I’m a regular old fairy with a wand. Mrs. Isaacson motored down only last Saturday and thought it was a perfect poem. And so it is, though I say it as shouldn’t.”

Florrie had paused on the deepest breath of purest satisfaction, and the time had come when Miss Glover must speak. She must find words to express gratitude and astonishment. She must not burst into tears. She felt that if she began to cry she would at once be very ill. She did not want to be taken ill before dear, good, kind Florrie. And it was, of course, a beautiful garden; far more beautiful than hers had ever been, no doubt; yet it hurt her so--to find her garden gone--that she heard her voice come in gasps as she said, “Dear Florrie--you are a wonderful friend--you are indeed.--I can never thank you enough. It’s a miracle.”

Florrie patted her shoulder--she had her arm around her shoulders. “My best thanks will be to see you happy in it, Edie dear, and getting well and strong again in it. It’s a regular surprise-packet, this garden, let me tell you, my dear. It’ll go on, that border, right up till November, one thing after another: I thought it all out, pencil and paper and catalogue in hand. I went over the whole colour-scheme with Mrs. Isaacson--there’s no one who knows more about it. And since most of the herbaceous things came from her garden, it didn’t cost as much as you’d think. They’ve always heaps of plants left over when they divide in autumn, and everything was at my disposal; and all the latest varieties, as I needn’t say. Wait till you see the lilies--yes, my dear, I’ve found room for everything; where there’s a will there’s a way is my motto, you know--and the phloxes and the chrysanthemums.”

She would never see them, though she was sure that they would all be very beautiful; she would never see these latest varieties from Mrs. Isaacson’s garden. And she would never see her own little garden again. How wonderfully fortunate it was--the thought went through her mind confusedly as she sat there, feeling herself droop against Florrie’s shoulder--that she was not to live with Florrie’s and to go on missing her own garden. How fortunate--but her thoughts swam more and more and tears dazed her eyes--that she had not to say good-bye twice to her pansies. She had died, then, really,--that was it,--on the moonlight night when she had last seen them. And she had left the house to Florrie, dear kind Florrie, and Florrie would go on having tea happily under the festoons of roses.

PINK FOXGLOVES

THEY were only beginning to revert. Last summer they had stood, spires of fretted snow tapering at the points to jade-coloured buds, at the edge of the little copse where the garden path lost itself among young larches, birches, hazels, and poplars, black and white. The sun set behind the copse, spreading in the summer evenings a pale gold background, and often when he went to look at his foxgloves and to listen to the lonely song of the willow-wren, rippling, like a tiny rill of water, from the heart of the wood, Aubrey Westmacott had felt that there was something almost dangerous in such bliss as this. To breathe this limpid air, to hear the willow-wren, to look at white foxgloves, and to know himself free forever from the long oppression of London--if he could have sung his wistful gratitude, his melancholy joy, the song might have been like the bird’s.

This year the change in the foxgloves had come as a complete surprise; he was still a novice at gardening. He had left his beloved garden for a week; regretfully, for he could not bear to lose a day of it--he was like a lover with a bride, long pined for, who each day grows dearer and lovelier; but he had gone, because it seemed churlish to refuse the old don friend at Cambridge--and when he returned, at evening, and had walked down to the copse and had seen them standing there, so delicately yet so decisively altered, the shock of the surprise had seemed all delight. He had intended white foxgloves to rise, always, against the copse; but then he had not known how lovely pink foxgloves could be. He had never seen them of such a shade, each bell of palest rose brimmed with shadows of mauve, and finely freaked within. Regiments of the white flowers had remained steadfast, so that there could be no sense of loss, and he had picked an armful of the pink ones and carried them back to the house, feeling, as he looked at them against his shoulder, that he would have liked to kiss them. He spent the remaining hours of dusk in arranging them. He never allowed the parlourmaid to arrange the flowers. That she saw him, tolerantly, if with a flavour of irony, as a very eccentric gentleman, he was aware, just as he was aware, quite cheerfully, that many of his kind neighbours found him a rather absurd one. But one of the deepest joys this new life afforded him, after the paternal bliss of seeing the darlings grow, was in disposing them about the rooms, with a loving discrimination that Ridley’s skilled but cold and conventional hands could never have accomplished.

This evening he put the foxgloves in the drawing-room, a tall jar on the bureau, a taller jar on the piano, and a group in the vast white Chinese bowl, wedged cunningly into place with stones among the stems. Here he could look at them next morning as he worked at his history. He always worked in the drawing-room, for there he had the morning sun, and, if he could not see his massed and tiered herbaceous border, could look out at the cherry tree and at the tiny squares of terraced lawns, dropping from level to level, with their stone steps and low stone walls and narrow jewelled bordering of flowers.

There was a very nice little study behind the dining-room--it was from the dining-room that one saw the herbaceous border, and he could meditate future rearrangements and harmonies while he ate his breakfast--but the study looked out on the stable shrubberies. He liked, too, to feel himself encompassed by his treasures, old and new, while he wrote of mediæval customs; his mother’s incompetent but loveable water-colours, sketches of her old home, the grey, ancient, gabled house among just such Cotswold slopes and uplands as his western windows looked out upon, though his mother’s old home, passed long since to alien hands, lay on the other side of the county; and his father’s seafaring trophies, from China and Japan and far Pacific islands, and all the lately acquired delightful solidities of Jacobean oak, and his maturest choice in printed linen. Here, on their background of mullioned window or dark wainscoting--such a gem of a little Jacobean house it was--the pink foxgloves greeted him next morning, set among feathery heads and sharp green spears of meadow grass, glimmering and poised on tiptoe, like groups of softly blushing nymphs, and he stood for a long time looking at them, his hands clasped behind his back.

He was forty-six, a fragile little man, blanched and stooping from the long years of imprisonment in the Government office, from which the undreamed-of inheritance had released him only three years ago, with faded gold hair hanging across his forehead and a gentle face of stifled dreams, the mouth slightly puckering as if in intentness on some task. The eyes, of a dim yet dense pastel blue that told darkly in his faded face, were intent, too, but not acute; they dwelt; they did not penetrate. He wore a small, short moustache, and a pair of gold _pince-nez_ dangled at his coat button.